


I Think You’re My Best Friend

by detuned_radio



Category: Bandom, Fall Out Boy
Genre: Angst, Fall Out Boy Lyrics, Fluff, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-04
Updated: 2018-03-04
Packaged: 2019-03-26 16:24:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,756
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13861569
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/detuned_radio/pseuds/detuned_radio
Summary: Thanks for reading y’all, comments are appreciated. Also! I’m writing a really long story that I’m kind of putting my blood sweat and tears into and I’d really appreciate if someone wanted to read over it and edit. You can message me on wattpad (I’m galactic-hofe on there) if you’d like to help me out. Again, thanks :)





	I Think You’re My Best Friend

Pete’s words have had a history of bringing Patrick to tears.

There was always something enchanting about how Pete would meld language to fit his feelings. In the earliest days of the band, Patrick considered himself the luckiest man in the world to be the one to communicate Pete’s words to the world, feeling as if he’d won the lottery every time he sang out twisted compositions built on bitter sarcasm.

When they wrote Saturday together, it all shifted. Now, Patrick wasn’t the vessel for the lyrics, carrying them from Pete’s mind to the world, he _was_ the lyrics. They had both put everything into it, figuring out how to work with each other. Ideas would bounce between them and engender songs alive with abounding energy, the kind that you could feel in your bones as it shook concert venues.

There was a similar feeling with Dance, Dance, one that remains one of Patrick’s favorites. The energy riding on their chemistry comes through strongly with that one, in a sarcasm and wittiness and charisma that the band had come to master by that point. 

But by Cork Tree, Patrick had started learning to become a different person when he delivered these lyrics. Whatever script he was given, his job as he sang would be to play the role of Pete Wentz. The music, he found, worked only when he got into Pete’s head. And sometimes, it hurts to be inside Pete’s head.

The first time Patrick remembers crying at Pete’s lyrics was when he read over the first draft for I’ve Got A Dark Alley. It was a mess of handwriting scribbled across crumpled pepper, but it held so much. He'd read it in the back of their van, driving down a highway well past midnight, Pete fast asleep right near him. He sat under a window, hunched over the paper in his hands and picking up the words little bits at a time as passing streetlights would bathe the inside of the van long enough to get through a line or two before he was left in the dark and the silence as the words set in and made his heart sting. Sometime between streetlights, he’d started tearing up.

When Patrick had finished reading, it took a moment with his hand clasped over his mouth to muffle ragged breaths and his eyes dripping with tears to compose himself. To have looked into this part of Pete’s soul--sad, lonely, guilty, desperate--had caught him off guard. He'd glanced down at Pete, peacefully asleep, but appearing suddenly more small. Patrick had laid down next to him, curled his body around him and an arm over his torso, and found comfort in the soft sound of his breaths.

Usually, the first draft of a song would be dramatically altered before it ever saw its way into a recording studio. That was another thing about Pete and Patrick’s creative relationship that worked in favor of the band, they knew when to scrap ideas, tell each other “this sounds bad, drop it.” But in the case of I’ve Got A Dark Alley, Patrick hadn’t touched a single word.

7 Minutes In Heaven still hits Patrick hard too. He remembers when they’d added the ‘Atavan Halen’ part the the title. It wasn't even particularly long after the dreaded night in the Safeway parking lot, and since then the event hadn't been brought up. Joe had been playing around with a guitar riff, Andy had laughed and asked when they’d become Van Halen, Pete had scoffed and muttered ‘Atavan Halen’ under his breath. It was the first time it'd really been mentioned at all, and a sign that, though the wound was still fresh, it was healing. 

It was one of the first songs Patrick read and immediately recognized as being about himself. _I don’t do too well on my own,_ had been the declaration or realization woven into the end of the chorus. It’s true, Pete always needs someone beside him. The worst thing you could do to him is leave him all alone, vulnerable and solitary. He’s always found sanctuary in crowds, in cities, the more people the better, it seems, among congeries of people, as if all of them packed together may keep his pieces from falling apart. Patrick has always been there when there weren’t bright city lights or roaring traffic, guarding him, making sure he was never alone, and the many nights that Pete has come asking to just lay next to Patrick in his cramped bunk aboard the tour bus for a while and talk until they fell asleep--and the many times that Patrick has immediately agreed--are testament to that.

With Cork Tree, Pete opened up to the world, and the world had gone silent to listen. It coerced Pete more and more to wear his heart on his sleeve, which carried through to Infinity On High. He wanted a slower song on this one, he’d said. No percussion, but a slow, melancholic cry into the universe. They'd spoken about it shortly after Patrick had first read over the lyrics. 

“This song… I want it to be you, all alone, under a spotlight, singing to no one and everyone at once. Just you and a piano, that's what I see when I think of the sound,” he described to Patrick. 

Golden. When Pete pitched that title, it'd hit Patrick all at once. This song was a warning, all the mothers raise their babies to stay away from me. _Stay away from me._ He’d said the same thing since the beginning of Cork Tree, but back them it had been _we’re_ bad news. Now it was himself, and the song lamented those that had ignored the warning signs and attached themselves to Pete anyways. Those that were once golden. Pete had always called Patrick that.

Hum Hallelujah was a difficult one. Pete had recited to him his ideas for it in the recording studio one night. “I think we could sample the actual song, too. Just to add atmosphere in the bridge. I don't really want it to be slow, either. That wouldn’t…” he’d glanced up when he felt Patrick’s eyes on him. “Patrick?”

He’d broken eye contact and shrugged. “No, yeah, that sounds good.” He was going to stop there but couldn't bite back what was eating at him. “Just, don't you think… I mean, this one’s about… personal subject matter, don't you think that make it hard to play live and such?”

Pete shrugged. “We have other songs like that.” Patrick nodded and all they exchanged for a few moments was tense silence. “I'm done wallowing in all that,” Pete finally spoke, but his voice was softer. “I'm not feeling sorry for myself over this anymore. That's why it can't be slow. This isn’t mourning, this is sucking it up and moving on.”

When the session ended that night, Patrick had made the hug he and Pete shared linger for a little longer than it usually did. He'd never understand how thankful and relieved Patrick was that he was still around.

G.I.N.A.S.F.S. had been an enigma for some time. When Patrick had first read it, it was clear that it was a love song, twisted in the most Pete Wentz of ways, but a love song nonetheless. They'd seen it to completion before Patrick realized what--or rather who--it was about.

“Pete, what the hell does G.I.N.A.S.F.S. actually stand for?” Patrick had asked ridiculously late into the production of the song. “And don't tell me it’s Gabe Is Not A Synonym For Sisky again.”

“No, it’s actually Gay Is Not A Synonym For Shitty. Y’know, cause our band gets called gay so much. I'm like, hey, fuck you, what if we were,” he laughed.

That's when it clicked, because, if you've known Pete as long as Patrick has, it clicks. Clever bastard just went and wrote a love song about Patrick in his typical sarcastic manner. He felt a blush rising immediately to his face when he realized those baby blues were his and that night in the roof of the hotel was one they'd shared.

Another song Patrick remembers crying as soon as he had to start working on it was 27, another time that playing the role of Pete Wentz was a daunting and painful task. He read the angry lines, could tell how hard Pete’s pencil had been pressing down onto the paper, could feel the frustration and the deep, simmering self-loathing in every verse. _If home is where the heart is,_ he'd written hopelessly, _then we’re all just fucked._ It made Patrick wonder who had been ‘the only place that feels like home’ years ago. 

But when Pete wrote What A Catch, Donnie, Patrick had fallen apart into tears for another reason. This time, he wasn't placing himself in Pete’s role. Pete was placing himself in Patrick’s role, making him sing about himself in nowhere near the same self-deprecating tone many of their songs had acquired, but how Pete saw him. In all, the song was a thank you from Pete, for saving his life, for sticking by his side.

For one reason or another, Patrick had been absolutely miserable when he’d sat down at the piano with the lyrics and read them over for the first time. The words Pete had supplied for him had fit his mood so perfectly, he’d let every bit of sorrow out into that tune, slow and heartfelt. 

He still cries when he plays it live sometimes, with the presence of the crowds around him and the lights waving slowly all around the stage in an ocean of luminescence and the presence of Pete next to him onstage. The knowledge that he could have lost him, but that he didn't, that Pete is still here and always will be--even after all these years since he nearly lost him, since Pete thanked him for sticking by his side, since he promised to never do anything like that again, it still brings him to tears. 

The hiatus was hard. They split up and chased separate ambitions for a while, and Patrick realized how different life was without Pete’s words, his poems, his every thought and feeling spilled out to Patrick, because it had been a habitual thing, Pete’s thoughts would always make their way downstream to Patrick. They still talked, because nothing in the universe could truly separate them, but not like before. They were no longer creating together, and so the chemistry they shared in their artistic relationship was absent. Patrick made his own music with his own lyrics, but still felt they had definitely been shaped by Pete’s influence in some way.

Pete had written a book, which Patrick bought, of course. It was good to have a taste of Pete’s words again. It was something he’d missed, and while, of course, the prose was different from his lyrics, it was still very authentically Pete.

Patrick remembers crying when he’d read about himself in the book. A character Pete had named Martin--the only actual name in the whole novel. He wondered what that said about who he was to Pete. Chuckled slightly when Pete mentioned that he ‘wasn't bad to work with,’ teared up a little when he stated he'd considered naming his son after Patrick, had to stop when his vision was blurred with tears as Pete described a night he remembered too well when he had nearly overdosed in their shared hotel room.

They'd thankfully come to recognize that the band was better together than apart. Save Rock And Roll was an album they were all proud of, as it was, overall, a eulogy about how Rock And Roll saved them. 

Patrick had stashed away some lyrics, ones that didn't have a place on Soul Punk, just in case Fall Out Boy would ever come back. Now that it had, he’d switched roles with Pete for this song, given him his draft for Miss Missing You. He'd never had to tell Pete directly how much he missed him over the hiatus--the song did a satisfactory job at that.

Sometimes Patrick wonders if Pete ever reacted over that song the way he’d reacted to some of Pete’s. He wonders if Pete ever cried over it, and he wonders if it ever hit him how much he means to Patrick. He hopes so.

It's been a long journey. They band’s been together nearly fourteen years, and they've all changed, but the important things have stayed the same. They're closer now than ever, and happier, too. It's been a long time since Patrick’s seen an I’ve Got A Dark Alley or a Golden. He knows Pete still struggles with the same feelings, but he knows that he’s also gotten generally more optimistic, and he couldn’t be more proud. He's amazed at how far they've come together.

Through all of the words Pete has passed to Patrick, many have destroyed him. Many have reduced him to tears as Pete apologized, grieved, warned, promised, moved on. But somehow, now, he finds himself perhaps stricken harder than ever by the lyrics scribbled onto the page below him.

Pete is sitting beside him, picking away at his bass as Patrick stares at the paper. Joe and Andy called it a night hours ago, and Patrick isn't even sure what time it is. Probably past midnight, but he can't be sure. Time isn't linear with Pete.

Patrick feels tears in his eyes and a tightening in his heart, not for the first time, certainly not for the last. 

_And in the end, I’d do it all again.  
I think you’re my best friend._

It’s so simple. There's no dancing around it, there's no twisting it into something deeper than it needs to be. It's there, it's clear, and it’s simple, and it means more than anyone who isn't Pete or Patrick could ever understand.

Patrick quickly wipes away his tears, but discovers it’s probably no use as more spring to his eyes to replace them. Pete notices and sets down his bass, looking at Patrick with worry. “Ricky?” He shifts closer, placing a hand on Patrick’s back. “You okay, man?”

Patrick glances at him, sees that concern in his eyes, and attempts a light chuckle, which only results in more tears. Pete doesn't even know what’s going on yet, but he put his arms around Patrick, pulling him close in a tight hug which Patrick immediately reciprocates, his arms falling around Pete’s frame as he buries his face in the crook of Pete’s neck.

He feels a gentle hand rubbing his back, soon accompanied by a gentle voice that asks “is anything wrong?”

He shakes his head quickly, no, nothing is wrong. This is far from wrong, this is entirely right, where he belongs, who he belongs with, always. “No, I’m alright. Just,” he sniffles and laughs softly, managing not to garner too many tears this time, “I know you're my best friend.”

Pete understands and immediately relaxes, Patrick can feel his muscles lose their tension as he practically melts into Patrick’s arms. “And you're mine,” Pete whispers. He cranes his head just a bit so that he can nuzzle against Patrick’s hair, his eyes closed as he rests his head atop Patrick’s. “I love you.”

Patrick’s grip around him tightens, wanting him closer, maybe close enough to feel his heartbeat, or feel his breaths, or read his thoughts, he doesn't know, all he knows is that he needs him, is so thankful for him, and that they could never be apart. “I love you too.”

And he'd do it all again. All the pain, all the heartbreak. All the Saturdays and the Dance, Dances as they got to know each other and learned how to work off of each other. All of the Dark Alleys and the Goldens and the 27s, where it hurt to watch Pete tear himself apart the way he did. All the Atavan Halens and Hum Hallelujahs where he almost lost Pete, but didn't, and slowly learned to move on. All the What A Catch, Donnies and the promises to never leave each others’ sides. All the Miss Missing Yous and attempts to tell each other how much it all truly meant. He'd do it all again to be where he was now, because the kids aren't alright, but they're together, and simply, that's all that matters.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading y’all, comments are appreciated. Also! I’m writing a really long story that I’m kind of putting my blood sweat and tears into and I’d really appreciate if someone wanted to read over it and edit. You can message me on wattpad (I’m galactic-hofe on there) if you’d like to help me out. Again, thanks :)


End file.
